Machado de Assis treats death with irony and disenchantment, without consolation: in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, it is the condition of the narrator himself, a dead man who writes from the other side. In the first chapter, he says that he is "not an author who is dead, but a dead one who authors, for whom the grave was another cradle."
Death also frees frankness. In chapter XXIV, Brás Cubas says that "frankness is the first virtue of a dead man," because there are no neighbors or audience left to judge him. In chapter LXXI, he points to "the great advantage of death": if it leaves no mouth to laugh, it also leaves no eyes to weep. In the epitaphs, in chapter CLI, he sees a "pious and secret egoism" in man, who tries to wrest from death "at least a rag of the shadow that has passed."
In Quincas Borba, death is the subject of ironic philosophy. The philosopher of Humanitism declares: "strictly speaking, there is no death, there is life," because the suppression of one form guarantees the survival of another. The doctrine belongs to the character, and the novel satirizes it; it is not Machado's creed. The final reckoning of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, in chapter CLX, is dry: the dead man says he arrived on the other side with "a small balance," that of having left no children.
On Clavis: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba.